Smoke the bullets and try chambering a round. Take the shell back out and check the bullet for marks caused by the bullet hitting the lands on the barrel. I'll bet his chamber is slightly shorter than yours and the bullets need to be seated a little deeper in the case. This happened to me when a friend tried to chamber reloads I was using in by 30-06 auto loader. The loads were tight in his, but worked fine in mine.

A permanent black marker will do the same thing. Carefully slide the rounds up in the chamber before trying to rotate the bolt. That way you'll avoid scratches all over the bullet from racking it off the follower. 'Gotta be particular about pulling it back out, too, if the extractor gets over the rim. The side pressure of the ejector on the round will score through your black marker or smoke. But it's kinda hard to mistake the "land" pattern if it's making contact with the bullet.

Let us know what you find.

__________________"The irony of the Information Age is that it has given new respectability to uninformed opinion." - John Lawton, speaking to the American Association of Broadcast Journalists in 1995

All good ideas, but there may be even more problem. You mentioned "surplus" brass. Most used brass (assuming you got it once fired) from military sources in this caliber has been fired in various machine guns, which are notorious for loose chambers and excessive headspace (by bolt action rifle standards). This means you might need to do a bit of extra duty resizing. Checking the shoulder carefully.

OK - I finally got a call back from him. He smoked a round and tossed it in there.

Seems the shoulder is, indeed, the root of the problem. I had him prep the casings at .010" under and seat the bullet at .010" under max, so tht wasn't the problem (the finished round is actually visibly shorter in both casing and and OAL than a surplus Chilean or PMC).

Now the tricky part. How to fix this? My 308 sizer is incorrectly set to where the holder actually bumps the bottom of the die.

Where is your brass your reloading from? Once fired in your gun? in his gun? Something you bought on the net?

If you are FL resizing this brass and camming over at the bottom of the press stroke then you have some kind of prob with the brass most likely. If that once fired brass was shot in a very long headspace chamber and the savage is very short headspace I have seen situations where dies cannot resize long brass enough to get it to chamber in a short chamber.

My recommendation would be to have your friend shoot a bunch of new cartridges in the savage and keep that brass separate for reloading for that rifle only. That brass should then be fireformed to his chamber, which should eliminate brass headspace issues.

My dad has a custom 300 ultramag with a match chamber. It will take reloads only from brass fired in itself. You cannot resize brass fired in other guns to fit it with conventional dies. This is probably similar to what you have.

Only if you tell me you are reloading brass already once fired in his gun would I then think you have an out of spec die or other issue with reloading equipment. I would not begin filing or messing with my reloading equipment which can then open up other issues.

It is possible your die is out of spec. I have an old set of Redding 30-06 dies that have been around a long time and they resize on the long side. I use them to resize the brass for my NEF to prevent seperation while still getting base sizing.

You state that "your die is incorrectly set to bump the holder". It is only incorrect if that's not where it needs to be. I use a RCBS X-die to resize my Savage 10FP 308 brass and it is set against the shell holder. The headspace is perfect for my rifle.

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